History & Biography
From monarchs to military heroes, notorious to unsung, we’ll feature biographies and research on women who history labelled dangerous.
Want to shine the spotlight on a dangerous woman from times gone past? See our submissions page for contribution guidelines.
Eilidh McCabe writes about her grandmother’s letters, notes and other papers, in which she discovered a gentle kind of dangerousness.
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Ruth Boreham writes of Mary Somerville, Scottish science writer and polymath – a truly dangerous woman defying expectations in the 19th century.
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Amy Blakeway writes on Marie de Guise, Queen of Scots from 1538 to 1542, who was the mother of the more widely known Mary, Queen of Scots.
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In 1888, uneducated, penniless, single-mother Louisa Lawson began Australia’s first feminist newspaper, The Dawn, championing the rights of women.
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Scottish Women Compositors in the Late Nineteenth Century
‘What we do know for sure about the Scottish women typographers of this period is that men saw them as dangerous…’ Robyn Pritzker looks back to the 1800s.
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Not ‘just’ a housewife
Dagmar Wilson referred to herself as a “mere housewife” but she disrupted political consensus during the Cold War, organising women to strike for peace.
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Beware!
Mary Barbour – social reformer, WW1 Rent Strike leader, founding member of the Women’s Peace Crusade in Scotland and a woman councillor in 1920s Glasgow.
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‘A dangerous woman gone mad’
Ashley Orr recounts the career of Nellie Bly, 19th century “stunt journalist” who wrote of “women whose stories might otherwise have remained invisible”.
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Dangerous women serving the city
Over the course of three centuries, the prostitutes of Florence ascended from outcasts to workers in the service of the state. Gillian Jack explains how.
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